The Vavasour Macbeth

by Bart Casey

  The vicar was most likely right about dating them to the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Stephen thought, looking quickly over a smattering of the papers. Several hands had written them. Here one was in a prim italic style, almost readable to any layman today—that’s probably a woman, he thought. Things Italian had come into vogue in the second half of the 1500s in England and young ladies in the better families spent hours and hours learning and practicing the elegant new standardized script.

  Most of the others were in the so-called secretary hand, the form most taught in school for writing correspondence or business and legal documents during those centuries. Its elaborate swirling lettering and irregular spellings are strange and unfamiliar to anyone today and Stephen knew that reading them would mean a tedious process of scrutinizing, deciphering, and transcribing each little mark, letter by letter, Latin or English, full word or abbreviation, and then mulling over the entire arcane concoction just to make out what it said. And often letters would be in code for privacy—just to make understanding them more of a challenge for curious servants. He’d been quite good at excavating meaning from such manuscripts at Oxford years ago—but he was out of practice now.

  Everything on the table so far seemed to be letters, with easily spotted salutations and signatures, and matching papers folded up to “envelope” the other sheet in transit.

  “And there’s at least as much again still there at the church,” the vicar said. “We’ll have to go collect all that now so the workmen can get started. See if there’s another shopping bag over by the icebox.”

  Reluctantly turning away from the tabletop treasures, Stephen found an empty orange Tyvek sack with wooden handles between the fridge and counter. It had an oversize rectangular shape made to be an exact fit with the shopping carts at the Waitrose supermarket 150 yards away.

  “Yes, that’ll do nicely—should be just about right for what we have to get, I should think,” the vicar said as he placed the last packet from his own cloth bag onto the tabletop and drew himself up erect, stretching the kinks out in his back one by one. “Oh—and you should put on some wellies or going down into the vaults will stain your shoes.”

  Stephen chose from a cluster of boots in the back hall off the kitchen and sat by the table, pulling them on as he twisted around for another glimpse of the letters. “You know, vicar, you just don’t see these sorts of things lying around like this. You might see printed books come up occasionally at auction—but not manuscripts. They’re all locked up in collections at the British Museum or the Bodleian. And it’s like going through hell to get a pass to touch them. Librarians bring you typed transcripts to look at, not the actual old originals, unless you have a damn good reason to see them. Now just look at all this. It’s incredible. Priceless, too, I should think—I mean probably ‘priceless,’ since things like this aren’t bought and sold anymore. Wealthy collectors like J. P. Morgan bought them all up at the turn of the century and now they are kept out of sight. I know from book auctions at Sotheby’s that important manuscripts from this period sell for thousands of pounds—and you’ve got boxes full of possibilities here. They could be worth a fortune.”

  “Well,” said the vicar, “I don’t know if any of these are ‘important,’ but I do know a little about the lady in the tomb with them: Anne Vavasour. She’s actually an ancestor on my wife’s side of the family. I’ll tell you when we come back with the rest of the papers. But now, let’s go across to the church—I know Andrew and the men will be waiting.”

  In just a minute or two Stephen was watching Vicar Hamilton step around some marble slabs and onto the ladder protruding out of the large vault below the floor of the nave. The vicar moved slowly and deliberately, shifting his weight onto the rungs. “Easy does it,” he said with a sigh.

  The miner’s lamp was suspended down into the vault, hanging about two feet below the ceiling, sending an ethereal yellow glow up into the empty church. Stephen had grown up around this church and been at choir evenings and weekends, but he had never seen the floor opened up like it was now, uncovering another world below.

  When the vicar reached the floor of the vault, Stephen knelt down for a closer look. He caught his first good whiff of the musty damp smell. Just an old wet cellar, he thought.

  He could make out several stacks of coffins piled atop one another, in varied stages of crushing and decay.

  “Bloody hell,” said Stephen, again forgetting how his cursing upset the vicar. But that one seemed to go by unnoticed.

  After walking around gingerly for a few minutes, the vicar came back up the ladder. He turned to Verger Andrew and the workmen. “I think the pump has got almost all of the standing water out. Another hour or so and we should bring on the mops, and then perhaps some fans. Andrew, you go down and see what you think while Stephen and I go over to the Lady Chapel.”

  They left the men in the nave for the small Lady Chapel off to the side with its old memorials.

  Set into one wall was a small decorative arch with the rounded figure of a marble knight reclining, arms folded across his waist and wearing what seemed to be a tunic of crusader mesh above his armored knees and feet. His figure stretched across two massive blocks of stone, both gently sloped to cradle him in sleep. No carved words remained, and the simplicity of the monument recalled the earlier thirteenth- and fourteenth-century styles, before the Italian influence of the Renaissance swept England.

  The monument of his Elizabethan neighbor was much more ornate. The suggestion of a marble altar rose about three and a half feet above the floor, with its top shelf protruding about eighteen inches from the wall. Perched at either end of that were two dark marble columns reaching up and supporting a chambered floral ceiling framing the central tableau. In profile there a sculptured lady knelt in a painted red dress, ruffed collar, and white cap, with hands pointedly clasped in prayer before a lectern and an open book. Just below the effigy, two crests framed an inscribed plate. Finally, the whole structure was protected on all sides by a black wrought-iron fence, with curving rails topped with golden fleur-de-lis finial points.

  “This is the memorial of Anne Vavasour,” the vicar said, “our relative. The vault below it was much less damaged than in the nave, but still took in a little water.”

  The floor of the chapel had been taken up in front of the Vavasour memorial to open the vault, and three stone slabs were piled up to one side. The rubble that had been immediately below the slabs was now mounded to the side on the floor. In the hole, a short slope of shards of brick and stones led down from the base of the memorial itself and stopped at the foot of a wall of smooth firestone blocks about four feet tall. Finally, a two-foot-wide section of red bricks had been removed from the center of the wall, leaving a gaping manhole amid the blocks, which was now partially illuminated by another miner’s lamp. The gate of hell, Stephen thought as he looked through the opening into the dark vault within.

  Vicar Hamilton stepped gingerly down the slope exposed by the digging. He steadied himself with his left hand on the fire-

  stone blocks of the wall and shone the hand torch in his right hand through the manhole into the vault. On the edge of the damp floor inside, just within reach through the opening, Stephen could see the source of the documents: a black wooden chest, its end panel knocked off and leaning beside it, admitting a view of some stacked papers within. Most of the papers closest to the opening had already been removed to the vicarage and a second stack farther in was waiting to come out. Also, a second black box, smaller and shorter, sat next to the first, partially blocking it. Shadowy suggestions of lead-encased bodies loomed in the dim background on either side.

  Peering inside the vault opening along with Stephen, the vicar said, “I thought these small cases might have held her children. But when I reached down to feel the damp on the larger one, the end panel just fell off in my hand—and that’s when I saw the papers. If I hadn’t touched it, we’d never have known at all. And there may be papers in the other litt
le chest as well—I haven’t tried to look inside that one yet.”

  Stephen stepped carefully down the slope of rubble to stand beside the vicar and look through the manhole. The larger chest was about three feet long, eighteen inches high, and the same again in width. Fashioned in black wood, it had ornate carving. “Probably ebony,” Stephen said—that had been a treasured and exotic wood back in the day. The main part of the chest seemed to be still held together by heavy iron metal bands. Only the one end panel had come loose; the rest of the chest seemed to be secure.

  Stephen knelt as the vicar held his torch, and then leaned forward to reach the papers at the front of the larger chest, gingerly. Holding his breath for a moment, he noticed his thumping heartbeat—and how ludicrously excited he was to be there. Pressing on, Stephen felt his fingers could shift a small stack of papers from the top into his hand. He tugged gently at them, and they slid slowly into his grasp. “I should be wearing some of those white cotton gloves they use to handle manuscripts at the museum,” he said stupidly—because of course it was impossible to get anything like that just now. He turned to the vicar and continued, “Why don’t I hand small stacks to you, and you can rest them up there on the church floor. I’ll put the hand torch down on the floor of the vault here, so we can see what we’re doing.”

  The vicar handed over the torch from his right hand and rebalanced himself to be steadier on the rubble. Stephen passed him an inch-high stack of papers and the older man pivoted around to place them next to one of the shopping bags sitting higher up on the church floor.

  After repeating this process a few times, Stephen and the vicar soon emptied the front stack of the larger casket. Turning to the smaller chest, Stephen reached down tentatively with both hands and grabbed its two sides. He tugged it carefully, moving it slightly forward on its four small raised feet. He picked it up—only about ten pounds, he thought—and passed it over to the vicar to take out. That left the larger, broken chest unobstructed.

  “This damaged one looks very heavy,” Stephen said. “I think we should just lift out the rest of the papers from the back and then get some help from the men to take it out. And perhaps we can seat a shovel underneath it to break any seal with the floor, and then drag it forward.”

  “All right,” said the vicar.

  Stephen picked up the torch and shone it squarely into the chest. At the back, some sort of scroll was perched on top of what seemed to be an embroidered bag and several bound books below. He then applied himself to taking everything else out of the chest, handing the contents to the vicar in small increments.

  When this process was completed, they had unearthed a five-inch stack of oversize sheets, along with the scroll, the bag, and several hand-sewn journals. Most were bone dry, but some of the lowest ones were a bit damp.

  ~

  Back in the vicarage with the papers and both boxes, the various surfaces of tables and floors of the kitchen, dining room, and lounge were soon covered with the damper sheets. Stephen had tried to lay them out in some kind of order so he would not lose the sequence in which they had been stacked—but such refinements had been an afterthought, and reconstructing the original order would just have to be a painstaking process later on.

  Besides the loose sheets, there were the hand-bound books, all about folio size, just over 300 millimeters by 240 millimeters (roughly 12 by 9½ inches). One of these had been inside the embroidered bag, which had a long strap and seemed to be its carrying case. It was as thick as a modern bride’s fashion magazine and the colors of its cover, which was also embroidered, were almost perfectly preserved. Still clear in the center of the front were the raised letters “AV,” stitched in gold thread inside a circle of what might be smallish pearls or beads.

  “Well, that’s something different,” said Stephen. “But why was the smaller vault so clean in comparison to the one in the nave? There didn’t seem to be anything like as much decay, although these things are much older.”

  “Verger Andrew explained it to me,” the vicar answered. “The difference was the marble floor in the nave. Marble traps natural condensation inside the vault, and once the humidity gathers the drops continually fall from the roof. So all that moisture was dripping onto the floor below, and over those stacked coffins. That made the wood coffins disintegrate and the lead inside corrode—so you end up with all that mess. But the Vavasour vault was fashioned completely out of the same firestone as the rest of our Norman church. It’s a type of sandstone so named because it was popular for fireplaces as well. It’s naturally porous and any condensation simply escapes, leaving no dew drops on the ceiling. So everything was dry—except until a modern-day toilet overflowed. That’s why the papers and everything else were so well preserved.”

  Stephen picked up the embroidered book from the kitchen counter.

  “Is it printed?” asked the vicar. “Or all handwriting? A journal perhaps?”

  “It’s all handwritten,” said Stephen, carefully peeking between its covers. “They had things called commonplace books. We had several on exhibit back at college. People would write down clever sayings they had read or heard—or prayers or poems they’d been sent—and then send the originals on to the next person. And they would practice their handwriting, too. That’s almost certainly what this is. The embroidery work and decoration were also practice sewing work by the owner—there’s a famous one like this that Elizabeth, before she was queen, made as a present for Henry VIII’s last wife, Catherine Parr, who was quite kind and motherly to her.”

  Stephen turned to another volume from the larger chest—one that was smooth to the touch. It had a plain deep brown cover, either leather or multiple sheets glued together and covered with some kind of shellac. The surface seemed dehydrated and cracking, and almost separated from the spine. It was sewn together with leather thongs. The contents looked something like lines from a play, but there were crossed out words and scribbled markings in the margins throughout. This one will be a nightmare to transcribe, thought Stephen, moving on to the other things.

  Even more curious was the scroll, which turned out to be sections of handwritten pages pasted together to form a continuous length that was then rolled up into a more compact size. “I have no idea what this is,” Stephen said, “but maybe a closer look will give us some clues.”

  “How about a cup of tea?” asked the vicar.

  “Perhaps it should be champagne or brandy instead,” Stephen joked, wondering exactly what it was they had unearthed.

  Stephen stayed with the vicar several hours into the afternoon, as they emptied out their bags onto the carpet in the lounge and then sifted gently through what they had found.

  Besides all the letters there were manuscripts of poems and journals containing what seemed to be plays or masques with annotations throughout. The commonplace book with the embroidery and another with a plain cover were sporadically dated and kept over a long period of time. From the dates in the journals and on some of the letters, it seemed that the papers constituted a family collection that started sometime in the 1570s and continued through the turn of the century into the early 1600s. The smaller box contained papers as well, but these seemed to originate later, and continued into the 1650s.

  The vicar told Stephen what he knew about Anne Vavasour. “She was actually quite a character, a maid of honor in Queen Elizabeth’s court along with two of her sisters. But she lost that position somehow and fell out of favor with the Queen. She had one or two children out of wedlock and was rumored to live a very long life—perhaps even into her nineties, which was unheard-of for the time. Back in the 1790s, a man named Reverend Wilson provided a detailed description of her tomb in a history of the parish he wrote.”

  Stephen packed up a good smattering of letters and sheets to take home for a closer look as well as the embroidered book—which he covered gently in plastic kitchen wrap for some minimal protection. He left its matching pouch behind with the vicar and promised to call in soon with a report. “A
bsolutely bloody marvelous!” he muttered as he walked out to his Mini and drove home.

  As he put the key in his own door, Stephen suddenly remembered how he had left Miranda and realized for the first time that he had not, in fact, left her a note. There’ll be hell to pay,

  he thought.

  He opened the door and stepped in softly, looking round. “Hell-low-oh,” he called, a bit too jauntily. Nothing but silence. Closing the door behind him, he walked through the front room, stuck his head into the kitchen, then the bedroom. Five o’clock. No sign. Looks like no note either. Then a quick look into the bath—and there he found it. “You shit!” scrawled in foot-high letters on the mirror in Miranda’s unmistakable deep maroon lipstick, with smaller letters underneath reading “Where the fuck are you?”

  Well, nothing broken anyway, he thought. If that’s the worst of it, I guess I’ve gotten off easy. Actually quite understandable given the excitement, not that Miranda will get too excited about this old stuff.

  Stephen sat down at the desk and swept everything littering the surface up into a short stack. Then he emptied the double-shelved bookcase to the right of his desk, stacking up his dictionary volumes in four heavy piles underneath the window. He put the much smaller books of poetry in three piles on the other side of the case. He wiped off the shelves before unpacking everything here. That’s going to become the vault, he thought. I’ll set out everything there in file folders and plastic slipsheets. Then at least I’ll know where everything is.

  Stephen spent the rest of the evening at home, starting with a nice gin and tonic and a sandwich, trying to decipher and copy out the letters and words one at a time so he could understand just what had been found.

  Some of the earlier letters clearly validated Anne Vavasour’s standing in the society of the day. Stephen had already recognized as a prize item one letter signed by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth. Burghley’s papers—all painstakingly catalogued and preserved in impressive bound-leather volumes—were the heart of the manuscript collection at the British Museum, where they were all guarded as national treasures. And now a possibly unknown original letter from the man himself was sitting on a shelf in Stephen’s disheveled bookcase, perilously close to a half-empty bottle of brandy.